The Stop File Lockers project ended all operations on the 31st March 2015.

Over the course of the project more than 1680 piracy sites were shut down and 1865 piracy source sites were shut down.

In the time since the Stop File Lockers project began, the payment processing industry has developed a good understanding of the risks involved in processing payments for file lockers and other piracy sites. As a result it is much more difficult to monetise piracy now than when the project began in June 2012.

We are sure that the ongoing evolution of technological approaches to the anti-piracy efforts of rights holders and the further understanding of the risks related to piracy sites will further restrict the monetisation options available to those who engage in commmercial piracy.

This site will remain as a permanent record of the project however no further comments or posts will be added.

Today paying consumers of content lost access to HBO, Hulu, ABC and other streaming services in Australia. These companies who are mostly content producers have introduced geoblocking which prevents paying customers accessing content legally.

When using a streaming device such as an Apple TV to access HBO from Australia a message appears saying “To Access HBO you must reside within the 50 states of the United States of America. If you reside in this area and are still experiencing difficulties please contact your television provider”.

When trying the same using Hulu the message is “GEORESTRICTION. We’re sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States. If you are inside the United States and believe you received this message in error please contact Hulu’s support team at www.hulu.com/support”.

Now in order to gain access to wide variety of content not available through legal means, Australian consumers either miss out or need to resort to piracy. We believe this is a backward step.

The Stop File Lockers project has been vocal in support of rights holders when it comes to content piracy. However when large content producers and services prevent paying customers accessing content legally they deserve all the piracy they get.

Keep2Share now have full credit card facilities back along with Google Wallet and nothing has changed when it comes to compliance. The site is still full of illegal and unlawful content, including incest, bestiality and potential child exploitation content, all able to be accessed when you buy a membership using your Visa or MasterCard.

One thing is clear, Visa and MasterCard need to immediately act against this site, ensure that the merchant acquirers involved are penalised and freeze all available funds then donate them to a worthwhile cause. None of this illicit income should ever be received by Keep2Share.

Now in our most recent examination of the site we have found hordes of incest content being made available and linked to from an equally distasteful incest themed forum. Keep2Share obviously have no controls in place to prohibit such content.

Piracy isn’t the only illegal activity taking place on file lockers. Recent research has demonstrated that hackers are using file lockers and streaming sites to exfiltrate stolen credit card numbers and other stolen data from their targets.

In a recent article published at Dark Reading, the methods used by hackers to exfiltrate data via video streaming sites were examined in detail. However this activity also takes place on file lockers.

Hackers who have stolen credit card, financial or other data need a way to exfiltrate that data without revealing their final destination for the data. So in a clever manoeuvre the hackers will embed stolen data into regular movie files and then upload them onto file locker services. Then once the data is in place, the hackers will then exfiltrate that data just as a normal file locker user would download files. Once the data has been retrieved the original files are deleted from the file locker.

In a recently released report, focussing on the partnership between credit card companies and file lockers, Mega was named as one of the worst piracy sites in the world. In response, and showing the sheer arrogance of Kim Dotcom, Mega have decided to sue Netnames for defamation.

Pirates monetise piracy taking place on Mega using ad networks that display an ad before redirecting users to pirated content. Such ad networks include adf.ly which displays an interstatial ad that cannot be bypassed before redirecting the user to the content being linked to.

Mega is a haven for piracy. Out of the top twenty sites (by number of links to Mega) most of them link to pirated content hosted on Mega.